PROVIDENCE – At the same time that Gov. Gina Raimondo created a working group to reinvent Medicaid through executive order, involving more than two dozen members in a public-private partnership to find $91 million in cuts from Rhode Island’s state Medicaid budget, she has also asked for a whopping 360 percent increase in the R.I. Commerce Corp.’s budget, escalating it to $83 million from $22.9 million.

Commerce czar Stefan Pryor testified on April 28 before the members of the R.I. House Finance Committee: “We need to ensure we have the capacity to get the job done for Rhode Islanders,” according to an article by Kate Bramson in The Providence Journal. “We need to be in the game.”

But, exactly what is the game that Pryor wants Rhode Island to be in to play? Building stadiums? Monopoly? Risk? Building innovation campuses?

The proposed budget includes about $8 million for the agency from the state’s general fund, including $3.3 million for 20 new full-time positions, and another $1 million for Pryor’s new staff: a deputy director, a director of communications, a chief of strategic planning, monitoring and evaluating, and an administrative support person, according to Bramson’s reporting.

Before hiring all these new positions – some 24 new FTE state employees – where is the analysis of the current staff at CommerceRI? What is the current staff’s level of competence?

What kinds of efficiencies might be achieved through an analysis of who’s doing what, and how effective have they been at their job?

As one Rhode Island businessman high up on the state’s financial totem pole wondered out loud to ConvergenceRI, after walking through the offices of CommerceRI for a meeting in early November of 2014: “What do all these people do?” Good question.

Without that kind of analysis – one that is hopefully transparent – the R.I. General Assembly is merely opening its checkbook without knowing what it’s getting in return.

Take, for instance, the new position of director of communications. Doesn’t CommerceRI already have a competent person, Melissa Czerwein, in that position? And, doesn’t it have a number of existing contracts with PR agencies for communication? How much and for what?

And, what is Marcel Valois’s new role in the hierarchy at CommerceRI? He was the former executive director, who replaced Keith Stokes.

Under the new reorganization, does Valois still maintain that role, under the direction of the R.I. Commerce Corporation czar Pryor? The R.I. General Assembly might want to ask for a better understanding of what exactly Valois’ role is under Pryor before signing off on creating a new position of Deputy Director.

Then there is the new chief of strategic planning? Once again, what’s the role here? What are the job responsibilities? Will Pryor and the Raimondo administration be hiring someone from out-of-state again? And, what are the agency’s metrics for job creation and job retention, tied to its small-business lending efforts? Those have apparently been missing in action since 2010.

Or, to make another comparison: the $4.3 million for 20 new full-time positions and Pryor’s four new high-level staff exceeds the $4 million a year for 30 years that James Skeffington, the new owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox, wanted the state to pay him as part of the deal to build a new stadium in Providence. [Note to the House Finance Committee staff: The $4.3 million for the 24 new hires is not just for 30 years; it is for perpetuity, and the price tag for salaries and benefits will increase each year.]

When Pryor testified before the R.I. General Assembly, saying that we “needed to ensure we have the capacity to get the job done for Rhode Islanders,” the underlying, but critically important question, unasked and unanswered, was: which Rhode Islanders?

The $4.3 million for 24 new state employees breaks down to about $179,000 a year in salaries and benefits per employee – not what many economists would define as jobs for the middle class.

Trouble coming every day
The selling of the need for another $60 million to build the state’s economic development bureaucracy so that it can be “in the game” of economic development comes at a time when much of the glare of the news media’s limited attention span is focused on Baltimore – where violence has spilled over into the streets, following the unexplained death of Freddie Gray, a young African American, following the aftermath of his arrest, from a nearly severed spine.

The indictment of the six Baltimore police officers involved in Gray’s death on May 1 may prove to be a watershed event in terms of changing the city’s criminal justice system, but it doesn’t address the basic underlying problems of the disparities in the city’s investments in economic development.

The same day that Pryor was testifying before the R.I. House Finance Committee, Michael Fletcher, a national economics reporter for the Washington Post, who has lived in Baltimore for three decades, wrote: “The gaping disparities separating the haves and the have nots in Baltimore are as large as they are anywhere.”

Freddie Gray’s life and death, Fletcher, continued, “say much about the difficult problems that roil Baltimore. As a child, he was found to have elevated levels of lead in his blood from peeling lead paint in his home, leading to a raft of medical and educational problems, his family charged in a lawsuit [over lead].”

The impoverished neighborhood in West Baltimore where Gray grew up, Fletcher wrote, once the home of Thurgood Marshall and Cab Calloway, “has more recently distinguished itself as the place that has sent the highest number of people to prison in the state of Maryland.”

The toxic legacy of lead
The next day, on April 29, reporter Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post followed with a more in-depth story, with the headline, “Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks.”

The story quoted Ruth Ann Norton about the legacy of lead in Baltimore. “ ‘In 1993, we found that 13,000 kids in Baltimore had been poisoned with lead, but we weren’t collecting at the levels that we are today,’ said Ruth Ann Norton, the executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. ‘If we had, we would have found 30,000 poisoned kids.’”

The story continued: “Overall, more than 93,000 children with lead poisoning have been added to the state’s Department of the Environment lead registries over the past two decades, a time frame in which Baltimore and other cities have substantially reduced the number of houses with paint containing lead.”

A child who was poisoned with lead, the story continued, “ ‘is seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system,’ Norton said. She called lead poisoning Baltimore’s ‘toxic legacy’ – a still-unfolding tragedy with which she says the city has yet to come to terms. Those kids who were poisoned decades ago are now adults. And the trauma associated with lead poisoning ‘creates too much of a burden on a community,’ she said.”

The reporter then detailed Gray’s life story and its intertwining with the toxic legacy of lead: born prematurely in August of 1989, Gray was tested for lead in May of 1990 and found to have more than 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood – double the level at which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges additional testing. Three months later, the story continued, Gray’s blood level had nearly 30 micrograms of lead; in June 1991, when Gray was 22 months old, his blood carried 37 micrograms.

The reporter than captured the response of Dan Levy, an assistant professor of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the effects of lead poisoning on youth.

“Jesus,” Levy gasped, when told of the high lead levels, according to the reporter. The fact that Gray had these high levels of lead, Levy told the reporter, “in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.”

Here in Rhode Island
There is little if any shock value to the fact that elevated levels of lead in school children – in Baltimore, in the nation, and in Rhode Island – have been found to have prolonged and deleterious effects on educational achievement and future economic attainment – in testing scores, in school readiness, in reading capability, in higher costs for special education interventions, and in school suspensions and in continued behavioral problems.

What was revelatory – as reported in the April 16 issue of ConvergenceRI – was the discussion led by Anna Aizer, associate professor of Economics at Brown University at The Population Studies and Training Center, who detailed some of her research on the deleterious effects of lead in Rhode Island’s children from the perspective of a health and labor economist at the Meeting Street School on April 10.
[See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

In particular, Aizer’s research focused on human capital – that in Rhode Island, “There was a whole subgroup for whom [human capital] is not being developed as it should be,” she explained, and as a result, “The economy is going to suffer.”



Looking at two cohorts, the children born in Rhode Island between 1997 and 1998, and again in 2004, Aizer documented in her research the disparity between white and black children with elevated lead exposure.


In the wake of Baltimore, and in the push by Pryor for $60 million in new state funds for the state’s economic development agency, the stubborn facts that Aizer talked about take on a new kind of relevance.

•  Aizer’s economic research tracked the fact that as a result of the new laws, which demanded that houses be deemed lead-safe and lead-free, the incidence of lead poisoning in Rhode Island fell dramatically in the six years between 1998 and 2004, in direct correlation to the number of homes – more than 40,000 – that received the lead-safe and lead-free certificates. But despite those gains, the gap between white and black children remained a constant – with blacks at higher risk.


•  Despite the decline in the volume of children with exposure to lead, Aizer cautioned that researchers have begun to understand that even “very low levels of exposure to lead can have a deleterious effect; you can take that as a given.”


•  The basic reason for the disparity in risk was not a puzzle, according to Aizer. African American children were much more likely to live in older housing, built before 1945, when the concentration of lead in paint was higher, or before 1978, when lead paint was banned. Some 83 percent of black children in Rhode Island – as well as poorer children – are much more likely to live in those older homes. The greatest concentration of such older homes is in Providence, with 50 percent of its homes built before 1978, and Rhode Island’s black population is highly concentrated in Providence, according to Aizer.

•  In her research, Aizer also was able to address the problem that lead levels are often correlated with all different kinds of disadvantages, called a confounding factor. Her research showed distinctly that as lead levels increase, the reading scores go down, across all other factors. Further, those effects don’t fade over time, and that 8th grade test scores are also problematic.

After her talk, Aizer talked with ConvergenceRI in a telephone interview, stressing the importance of additional research that was needed on lead – linking more economic meaningful outcomes, such as educational attainment and criminal justice activity.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Aizer said, responding to ConvergenceRI’s question about research studying the links between other kinds of behavior as children with lead poisoning as they become adults. “Research needs to establish the relationship between very early exposure to lead and later, arguably, more important outcomes.”

A new research grant award is pending to look at crime data and outcomes with respect to criminal behavior and lead exposure, Aizer said, which would be a first in that respect. The next step, Aizer continued, will be to look at the cohort links with labor market outcomes.

Halt the investment in structural violence
The impertinent question – one that is not on Pryor, Raimondo’s or the R.I. General Assembly’s radar screen, is this: Instead of investing some $60 million more in the state’s economic development agency, with at least $4.3 million a year in new, highly-paid, full-time employees of the state, why not take that same money – $4.3 million a year – and invest it in the urban neighborhoods in Rhode Island, cleaning up the lead paint, renovating the housing stock, bulldozing the abandoned buildings and lots, backing the efforts of the R.I Alliance for Green & Healthy Homes?

From an economic development perspective, the return on investment – in reducing the number of emergency room visits and hospitalizations from asthma, in improving the educational performance of students by eliminating lead, in creating a road to new economic opportunity through better housing – may prove to be far greater than enriching 24 new state bureaucrats with lifetime jobs.

As Barbara Fields, the new executive director of Rhode Island Housing, told ConvergenceRI in a recent interview, recalling the phrase, “The road to economic opportunity begins at your front door,” which was used by the Housing Network, said: “Housing is the starting point; it’s the foundation for families, and how it connects to the broader opportunities.”

Rebuilding the middle class in Rhode Island begins with more, better, safer affordable housing, not high-level state jobs.